


So Loves Oblique

by PasdeChameau



Category: The Terror (TV 2018), The Terror - Dan Simmons
Genre: Alternate Universe - Post-Canon, But not in an especially angsty way, James and Sophia have a lot of depressed and depressing sex, Like James is doing his best, Mild Period-Typical Sexism, Multi, None of which is particularly explicit, Sometimes accompanied by weird and sad dirty talk, Survivor's guilt all-around, Umm...mentions of infertility, Victorian sexual slang, but you know
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-14
Updated: 2019-01-14
Packaged: 2019-10-09 22:35:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,115
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17413811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PasdeChameau/pseuds/PasdeChameau
Summary: James lives, and returns to London. Francis does not.





	So Loves Oblique

**Author's Note:**

> Bleh, I messed the formatting up the first time I tried to post, and am reposting in kind of a hurry. Hopefully there's no new mistakes.

The first time James has her, it is at the fete given in his honor, just beyond a scantly bolted door.

Though, after all, it would be more accurate to say that she has him. It is Sophia pressed up against the wall of books, stuck fast as a pinned butterfly, but it is also Sophia who rucks up her skirts and tugs his hand between her legs. Likewise, it was Sophia who drew him to this room, where the candlelight flickers in liquid shadows on her turquoise gown (should she not still be in mourning, and never here to begin with?), fey and worldly and wild. Sophia too, who had plucked his glass of port from him, finishing it in one swallow. That had shocked him more, somehow, than what transpired after.

Now, he tastes the cling of sugar on her lips as his fingers work on and in her. It’s been years since James was with a woman, but Sophia doesn’t seem to notice, though she does leave him stiff and aching in the empty trough between her hip and mons—perhaps that is his punishment.

“I do regret it very much,” he says afterwards, as Sophia pins back a loosened curl, “That I could not return him to you.” Too late, it occurs to him that she may think he was speaking of Sir John; Francis’s presence still coats his every thought.

She turns to him, wide-eyed. “I know that, Captain Fitzjames. Of course I know that.” She drops a tidy curtsy then, and James wonders if he’s going mad. “Do call on us—myself and Lady Jane—won’t you? Only—" she bites her lip, still kiss-stung, then hurries on, "Only, you must promise under no circumstances to propose to me. Your word?” Genuine concern—perhaps even concern for him—soaks her words like honey, and James nearly laughs.

 

Ross visits him the following morning, bearing unofficial word of his discharge, ostensibly on medical grounds. It isn't unexpected; returns such as his might inspire polite promotions, but rarely real confidence. Ross is properly commiserative. James wishes he were not. He stokes the fire, casting about for a change in topic. When nothing appropriate comes to mind, he doubles down on his discomfort, resolved at least to satisfy his curiosity.

“Do you know, I told Miss Cracroft last night I was sorry not to have brought Captain Crozier back. I might better have tendered my apologies to you. She was—well, out of mourning, at any rate.”

Ross snorts. “Miss Cracroft was there? I suppose it’ll be in all the gossip rags by noon. Like her to wear her grief in vivid hues. Mind you, I do say grief; she loved Sir John, and I’m sure she cared for Francis, in her way—perhaps just not a way he was equipped to bear. Be careful.”

 _Of her or with her,_ James wonders, and settles on the former for good humor’s sake. “You think me much similar to him?” The smile he wears feels taut, too small, upon his lips.

Ross lets the irony lie, tilting his head thoughtfully. “Perhaps, perhaps not. It's been—Lord—nigh on five years since I saw him last. Time enough for a man to change, certainly; I expect you knew him better than I by the time he passed, and isn’t that the moment that gives you the true measure of a man?”

James can’t speak, can’t look into Ross’s sad and searching eyes, can only choke his acknowledgment as Ross lays his hand lightly on his shoulder—so briefly James can’t be sure whether it was ever there at all.

 

He has no intention of seeing her again. The life of a pensioner is lonely, though, and the idea of bruising himself against the same woman who had so used Francis has a charm all of its own. He calls within the fortnight.

Lady Jane, it soon emerges, has little use for him—a sentiment James can hardly fail to sympathize with. Sophia's intentions had in any case been clear from the start, even to her aunt, who gives off an air of jadedness where her niece's behavior is concerned. And so Lady Jane leaves Sophia and James to their own devices, and so they join in a variety of imaginative configurations, untroubled, for the most part, by any pretense of conversation.

This is as James would have it. He had thought at first that he would like to speak of Francis, but Sophia’s interest in the topic seemed limited to the profane. Once, after she had gotten James off with her mouth, she remarked, “Francis used to put his fingers to my face, just here,” and traced the curve of her brow wistfully—hesitantly, even—with a thumb. The sound of Francis’s name, however fondly dropped, had made James’s heart trip over a beat. He pressed a hand to his eyes, blotting out the noonday light, and felt Sophia touch his arm. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”

 _But of course, you knew you would,_ he thought venomously, _and for a thousand different reasons._ Still, he twined his fingers into hers.

 

On a fresh spring day, when the air inside grows too stifling by comparison, he takes her walking in Hyde Park. It’s April—the sun only just unboxed and the air washed bright and clean. Sophia’s arm is hooked through his own, though she shows a propensity to wander on her tether, drifting like a kite towards every flower, every leaf that captures her attention.

“Was this the way it was with you and Francis?” she asks suddenly.

James doesn’t stumble, but he starts, twitching her a little closer to his body in the process. “I’m afraid our strolls were rather less pleasant.”

“Come, you know that isn’t what I—“ but something breaks across her face then, and she cries, “Oh, Captain!”

Alarmed, he steers her to a more secluded area, deposits her on a bench, mechanically surrenders his handkerchief to her. The convulsive straining of her sobs draws blood to her cheeks—not prettily, in dainty blotches, but in a rough and patchwork way. The sound alone seems as though it could shred her throat to ribbons. Seeing her—hearing her—now, James realizes he hadn’t thought her capable of any honest emotion but lust (and that, of course, so compelling that even the most practiced liars bent to it). He had taken her very bluntness, appealing as it could be, for another fold of feminine guile. Now, guilt gnaws at him.

When she calms, he escorts her home, the stiff shell of her bonnet knocking gently every now and then against his shoulder.

 

They don’t always fuck outright; indeed, Sophia seems to take a certain pride in dreaming up more esoteric ways of coupling. Still, she has a predilection for playing at St George, and they indulge that and other fancies with regularity, if not exactly predictability.

Once, with Sophia still sitting astride him, James asks about the timing of these encounters. “Do you not worry about—“

She levers herself off him, sits primly on the side of the bed as she pulls her clothes back on. Stockings before drawers—an odd choice, but practical given the coldness of the floorboards. He finds himself thawing to her, as he does from time to time; he regrets not sucking a bruise to the pale calf she’s just now covering. “It isn’t something you need concern yourself with.”

James sours a bit at that. How could he not, being who he is? “Perhaps not so much as you,” he allows, “but—“

“Oh, for God’s sake.” She turns to face him once more. “I don’t bleed as other women do. Not anymore, that is. No doctor could tell me why, and so—” She shrugs. It’s a beguilingly unladylike movement, graceless and heavy.

“Is that why you refused him?”

He had spoken without thinking; the look she gives him now could gut. “How like a man to assume so.”

Cheeks burning, he aims for levity. “Ah. And is _that_ why?”

She frowns. “No,” she says. “No.”

 

Jopson, his promotion to lieutenant disallowed, calls on him one blustery winter's day.

“I’m sorry,” James says, and means it, though perhaps not so much as if it were Bridgens—dead now, of course, with Peglar. “If I could afford it—but I don’t keep a valet.”

“That’s alright, sir. I understand.”

He looks so downcast that James cannot leave it at that. “I could put in a good word for you, if you like. With Lady Jane.”

Jopson regards him sharply. “With Miss Cracroft, sir?”

“With Lady Jane,” James says firmly, then shows Jopson the door and downs a tumbler of gin.

 

“Do you remember,” Sophia begins another day, “What I asked you that afternoon in Hyde Park?”

He studies the teacup in his hand, the stem—reedy as a bird’s bone—pinched between his fingers. The liquid inside has the glazed sheen of tepid milk; they had paused, halfway through, for him to tongue her lower lips. “Yes.”

“Well?” she asks, tone light—inconsequential. She is perched upon an armchair now, straight-backed and fully clothed.

James hesitates. The most he’d ever held of Francis was his hand. That, and the tooth Francis had plucked from his mouth one weary evening. A sign of worse to come, but Francis had only huffed a laugh and rolled the thing—a canine—between his fingers, flipping it into the air as he might a coin. It had glinted dangerously in the lamplight, and when James caught it, it felt hard and heavy as an anchor in his palm. Thoughts of both—tooth and flesh—are stashed away inside his mind, memories he dares approach only askance for fear of being scalded.

“Yes,” he says at last.

Her eyes narrow. “You’re lying.”

He considers taking offense, but finds he doesn't have the energy. “You think he would not have been amenable?”

Sophia rises from her seat and paces towards the windows, fiddling with the drawn curtain. “On the contrary. The deeper Francis’s feelings ran, the harder they would have been for you to pry forth.” A pause, then she looks at him in the kind and serious way he can so easily imagine undoing Francis. “Why did you say otherwise?”

He shrugs. How tired he is. “It was the answer you seemed to require.”

Her lips quirk, but her voice is wet and drowning. “It would have given me comfort, I think. Now.”

“And yet you would not marry him.”

“And yet,” she agrees. “I suppose I thought it safer—to love by halves.”

No point in asking whether she found it to be so. The silence stretches on, interminable, and James averts his gaze; looking at Sophia now seems an intimacy more dreadful than any they’ve shared. Finally, she seats herself beside him on the chaise. “But tell me, Captain Fitzjames, do you always so tailor your words to your listener’s desires?”

He can bear it no longer; he sets the cup down and weeps.

 

She mentions it once more, when she has bribed the servants into silence and stolen to his rooms. Save for that first evening at the gala, their encounters have always been carried out by daylight, but he finds the night suits them, the heat of her body coiled against him like a spring in the blackness.

And then she is lying next to him, eyes fixed on the ceiling but fingers wrapping around his wrist. “Tell me how it would have been,” she murmurs, “between you.”

He isn’t sure at first that he can manage it at all, and when he begins, it is with strict blinders guiding him—a strangling grip on imagination. The scene he describes is spartan, if not chaste; he can’t quite bring himself to detail the removal of clothes, for instance, nor the way Francis’s mouth might have shaped itself to his prick. Instead, he talks of them rutting against one another in the endless, austere light of the Arctic summer, their mouths the only things warm and dark between them. Beside him, Sophia shivers in want and grief.

At last, he falls silent. “I did love him,” she whispers, turning into his shoulder. Softly, her palm lands on his chest, unfurling flat as a map.

“Yes,” he says, and lets sleep take him.

 

She ties his cravat for him in the morning, and he laces her into her corset.

He stops her with her hand upon the doorknob. “I’ll call Tuesday next, if you’re agreeable, and not propose.”

She smiles. “Of course,” she says, and leaves the door unlatched behind her.

**Author's Note:**

> For the purposes of this fic, I have totally handwaved all 19th-century decorum re: proper female behavior, even by Sophia’s admittedly relaxed standards. Don’t worry, though: I have a degree in Victorian literature, and can therefore do these kinds of things with impunity.
> 
> “St George,” according to my very cursory Googling, is 18th/19th century slang for cowgirl/receiving partner on top. Frankly, I didn’t spend too much time trying to find corroboration for that, because I just found it too, too funny not to believe.
> 
> Last but not least, the title is taken from Andrew Marvell's "The Definition of Love."


End file.
